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Philadelphia Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections

In the formative years of Cubism, Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso strove to make paintings that would not be perceived as illusionistic renditions of reality. Accordingly forms became shifting planes and color was all but eliminated, because colored forms would have suggested traditional illusionism. Finally, in late 1912, when Braque made the first Cubist collage, or papier collé (literally "pasted paper"), by pasting strips of wallpaper on to a charcoal drawing, he had found a solution for allowing form and color to exist as independent elements in a composition; the strips of paper served as the color, while the forms were drawn in charcoal. In this early papier collé the charcoal forms of a guitar hover above and around three pasted paper planes that, because of their subtly angled juxtaposition, also suggest a slight shifting. Certain calculated ambiguities, such as the arc cut out of the blue paper, seemingly to reveal an opening below, and the placement of the word VIN (wine), whose last letter is partly written on the blue paper, likewise create the sense of overlapping planes perpetually shifting in space. Innis Howe Shoemaker, from Philadelphia Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections (1995), p. 237.